LILLIPUT share their experiences of living in a city, rich in musical history

Engrossed in a city full of rich musical history, the larger than life psychedelic mob Lilliput felt comfortable and inspired enough to forge a record that is entirely new but remains in familiar ground to old fans. We spoke to Joe from the band about what’s going on within the album.

“When we formed a band in Sunderland shortly after that we travelled down to Liverpool to play our first live show. We figured it’d be nice to start with a trip away. Rob (producer) came to that show and expressed his interest in recording a song or two and we’ve worked together when possible ever since. We’d never had the opportunity to work on a longer time scale with Rob and we felt confident in him for the debut album”.

‘Do You Love Me?’ is an upbeat opener for the album but resembles quite the opposite looking deeply into the song context.

“The song can be interpreted like you’re seeing everything with rose tinted glasses. I wrote this track as a rhetorical question. The song is subjected with forming relationships than maintaining my own self worth. It’s not a love song, which appears so from the first listen, it’s quite the opposite”

“Autumn Leaves is a sound and a feeling that for some reason appeals to 6 lads in a small North Eastern English town. I think it might come down to industry. We’re from industrial backgrounds and at times we feel a little cut off from that past. The North has seen such drastic changes. I was thinking of the harvest season (The Band – King Harvest) and how it’s significance is almost lost to us now. The manual side of life too is drawing to an end… ‘once on land, we move to towns and where we stood stand factories now.’ Soon enough those factories may leave and then what?”

“Waiting to Go is the album finisher and that’s probably the first we wrote out of the album tracks. That song really helped us develop our sound and I think as a last track it’s as strong as the first”

With six people in the band, they went into great depths working out how to strip back of large arrangements all the time and leave more space in the recordings.

“David Bowie was also a massive influence for the record. Bowie died the first day they began recording. That was a real talking point. It’s not overly there to hear on record but those kind of people inspired us from the start. We were listening to Bowie tracks and talking production and vocal delivery, all of that jazz. I remember someone telling me how much Bowie disliked recording sessions and a lot of the takes were a case of ‘do it and move on’. Imperfection sometimes makes a recording all the more special. We tried to apply that idea more in the recording process”.

Summing this up it’s not always the songs themselves that tell the story behind a well recorded album it’s the influences and drive behind it that makes records like this echo for a long time.